sunday sermon preview

[beachpsalms]

I've been struggling with my Epiphany sermon all week - reading about light imagery, and how our image of three wise kings is influenced more by Christmas carols than scripture... and all of it not going anywhere at all in my head.

But finally (and none too soon, really) it flipped around and fit together. Rather like turning around that one jigsaw

Comments

[susannah]

WOW!

"So to go back to Halberstam - it is not enough to claim a title: be it lesbian, Christian, wise man, saviour - if we are still going to follow established patterns of hierarchy..."

Just wow! That is a hugely challenging and uncomfortable thought.

As a transsexual christian, it's so easy to adopt the label, or even the revised gender label, and think... that's it... made it... I'm there...

BUT

This angle you express is just enormous in its challenge. And the issue of our position in relationship to hierarchy... to our own comfortable privilege...

And the thought that we so often depend on labels... and even exchange one label for another, but actually don't fundamentally change...

"We are called, instead - like the wise men - to follow the light, the star, when it leads us to the marginal places, and take up living there. It is, after all, where Christ can be found..."

I think, reading Elizabeth Johnson's book "She Who Is" this opened me up a bit to the challenge of shifting our whole relationship to christianity, and considering how - to take just one example - feminist theology may compel us to stop and listen to the voice of women along the margins, suffering subordination and abuse for example, and captives in poverty...

And then, thinking about your own point...

Just what does the label "christian" actually challenge us to be and do? Is it just a convenient label which makes us feel good, from inside our own privilege and the hierarchies we accommodate? Or does it lead to the outskirts of the city, to the drunkards and prostitutes, to rejection... as it did for Jesus himself...

And I really like that parallel with Puah and Shiprah - I think that's an inspired intuitive parallel to draw... the point being that sometimes "the righteous" are actually the outsiders, not the insiders.

I've been looking a lot recently at sexworkers, and talking to them, and sharing with them. How easily the respectable church or respectable society can sometimes marginalise who they are and what they do.

Yet just imagine... if some of them are "the righteous" too... along the skirts of society... and precious beyond measure to the ever-living Godde?

Would it be possible to re-publish this blog of yours on my own blog? (No problem if you'd rather I didn't - I only ask on the basis that you may prefer me not to.)

[beachpsalms]

I think we are absolutely called to take up residence on the margins. I'm so thrilled this entry resonated with you. If you want to repost it, please go ahead.